It’s not as though we couldn’t work it out from the passport and stolen cash
Read what’s reported beneath this photograph. This was taken from the ‘live’ internet reportage direct from the courtroom.
Those who insisted on believing it was a double suicide attempt really need to examine their thinking skills and their ability to evaluate human situations given even just the few facts that were available at the start.
What we are looking at here is a man who planned to flee the country, pausing only just long enough to fling the girls off the cliffs before he left.
‘But maybe she jumped!’ Oh really? He bought her enough pills to fell a horse, bullied her into writing a suicide note and telling her to leave it where “it will be found”, drove her to Dingli Cliffs in the middle of the night and hoped she’d jump of her own accord so that he wouldn’t have to push her off.
What do you think he’d have done if she refused to jump – driven her back home to daddy, packed away his passport and his letter from Miss Denmark the Midget Fancier, returned the stolen cash to the cash box, and gone to work the next day?
He’d have pushed her. And that, I believe, is what he actually did.
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It all makes sense, and IF NOT PUSHED HER, he manipulated and brainwashed her into jumping and ending it all, which in my opinion is the same as killing her.
But since he had his passport with him, it’s quite clear that he was going to run away and not jump. It’s also quite clear that he went down to get the passport and keys from the jacket that was lying next to the body.
What puzzles me is why was the jacket next to Lisa?
Mr Tanti had cash in his car.
He says he “jumped” but then he only fractured a few ribs.
And still there are people who believe that he wanted to end it all.
As a father of two daughters my heart goes out to Tony Zahra, who must be devastated by the loss of his daughter.
I really would be totally unable to face the world in the dignified and stoic manner Mr Zahra is doing.
As for little Tanti?
The court should throw the book at him and make sure it sticks. Today Lisa Marie, tomorrow someone else’s daughter.
“For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.”
From The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde.
Lines taken out of context, of course.
[Daphne – I knew somebody would quote that.]
Oscar wrote that for his beloved Bosie.
OK, you believe that he killed her but why such intolerance and aggression towards those who do not agree with your version of events? And what is it with these playground insults about his height? If you believe him to have done what you say you do then surely to tease him about being below average height is puerile and crass to the point of insensitivity. Surely if he is a murderer of a young girl, the fact that he is short is pretty irrelevant. A girl has died so don’t trivialise this as if you are criticising some Super 1 presenter about what they are wearing. What is so bad about being short anyway? Short people are not all inherently evil, if that is what you are suggesting.
[Daphne – His height (and shape, face and premature baldness…) is a major factor in all this. His physical appearance and the consequences of it have shaped his personality, his psyche and his outlook. If he were tall and handsome, none of this would have happened. This is not to say that all unnaturally short and/or ugly men become warped, far from it, but in certain men, lack of height warps the psyche, and when the lack of height is spectacular even in a land of very short people like Malta, and over and above that is coupled with a very bad figure and a very homely face, you’re looking at trouble. I think it can be safely said that if Erin Tanti were tall and handsome, or even just tall, none of this would have happened.]
You’ve opened up a fascinating, if painful, topic of discussion there. Speaking as I do from a worm’s eye perspective, it seems to me that in Malta, land of the second shortest men in Europe, there is very little to train the short-arsed in the art of coping and making the best of it.
Surely if all other handicaps are catered for, then it’s time the short lobby made its voice heard.
I don’t think I know a single short man born after 1980 who’s evolved normally. They all affect some form of projected greatness: either geekism, or extreme Bohemianism, or industrial-scale promiscuity with women three feet taller, or excessive extraversion, or all of the above.
And this is one problem that an EU passport and freedom of movement won’t solve. If anything, it makes it worse.
Tall people have their own areas of concern.
I’ve been thinking about this since the last mention.
Tall people have back problems, workspace height problems – even sitting at a normal table is uncomfortable – shoe sizes are often ordered in limited supply, trousers are short, skirts expose too much, dresses have waists in the wrong places, they need to eat larger quantities, sitting on an Air Malta plane requires planning to sit on the aisle but not trip up the steward/air hostess, level eye contact is a rare occurrence, etc.
What it does is offer a one-off opportunity to be forced to develop an own sense of style and approach. You’ve done that.
Would you exchange your intelligence for height? Would a little less be worth a little more? I hardly think so.
Would you put it all at risk for a moment of negative mention? Again, I hardly think so.
Here’s a vote for Baxxter, and I hope that I will be able to use it one day.
That’s like saying that fit, thin women have their own areas of concern.
See my point? Back in the day, the Ideal Woman was thin and pretty, and magazine covers and adverts were full of them. Then post-PC, we started getting images of normal women, including the frumpy, the pudgy, the homely and all that. Now it’s the latest in cutting-edge marketing.
But what about the Ideal Man? It’s still a six-foot, sculpted Adonis, with designer stubble over a chiselled jaw, and the eye of a CEO.
Don’t give me that Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise reply. The former is hardly any modern girl’s fantasy, and the latter is derided by all precisely because of his height.
It’s not even about our lack of pulling power. Try facing a panel of normal-sized men and women at a job interview. The condescension will kill you before you even open your mouth. Even if you do get a job (perhaps by some statistical fluke your interviewee happens to be vertically challenged and takes pity), you find yourself facing the big bosses, who will literally look down their noses at you.
The insufferable condescension of Alex Sceberras Trigona, Tonio Borg, Kevin Ellul Bonici and Edward Scicluna is the stuff of legend.
Let me follow the advice of those clever entrepreneurs from Linkedin and be proactive here: what Malta needs is a school for jockeys and polo players.
Don’t worry about it, Baxxter.
We’re not short, we’re ‘fun sized’.
I believe she grabbed his jacket and jumped.
Poor girl!
I think he pushed her, and she grabbed it instinctively.
[Daphne – He’s unlikely to have pushed her while standing with his jacket casually draped over one arm. If she had grabbed at his jacket while he was wearing it, it would have been Erin Tanti, and not just his jacket, which followed her down the cliff.]
No, he would not have been wearing the jacket.
And let us not forget that his jacket, containing his car keys and passport were found near her.
This, in my opinion, is a very good indication that she did not jump intentionally.
Why would she jump taking his jacket with her? She probably clutched at it as she felt herself going over the cliff in an attempt to save herself.
Yes, my thoughts exactly.
I cannot quite understand how the jacket, car keys and passport got to the bottom of the cliff. Who threw them?
If he intended to escape it is hardly likely that he threw them down himself. It must therefore have been the girl who threw the jacket down. Why?
[Daphne – She found out that he was planning to run off without her. So she chucked his jacket, which by that stage she would have known contained his passport and keys, off the cliff – out of a mixture of anger and a wish to stop him doing it. And he pushed her after it.]
The car was locked.
The keys were in the jacket.
Your theory does not hold water, because, if anything, she would have noticed the contents of his jacket pocket while in the car. Had she run off, he would then have been unable to lock it. (Unless, of course, she locked it remotely to spite him – rightly so, too – and chucked it off the cliff afterwards.)
[Daphne – There is no way she could have discovered the contents of the jacket in the car, because he was wearing it while he was in the car. How did I work that out? Precisely because the car keys were in the jacket pocket. When men get out of the car wearing a jacket, and lock the car while still wearing their jacket, they automatically put the keys in the jacket pocket. The keys go in the trouser pocket if they are either not wearing a jacket or holding their jacket in their hands. She discovered the contents at some point after they got out of the car, and at that point, he wasn’t wearing his jacket which is why she was able to get hold of it. Have you ever tried to pull a jacket off a man when he doesn’t want it pulled off him? It’s impossible.]
Yes, true.
I’m just thinking of more possibilities.
Maybe he took off his jacket because he was acting as if he were going to jump. A jacket would act as some sort of protection, jumping without a jacket means less protection. Maybe? Then… any of the above.
The more one reads the information being filtered out to the public from second hand reports of the court proceedings the more one is left with unanswered questions.
I am curious about the knowledge of the accused’s mother in all of this.
I remember reading a report saying that she knew Lisa Zahra and had even entertained her at home but thought that she was 17.
I don’t know if parents have changed in the 30 years since I was in my teens but it just occurs to me that any mother spending any time with her son’s date would give the two of them the third degree including asking where the girl went to school – in this case at 17 she should be in Sixth Form.
Questions about where she was going to school, how she had done in O-levels etc would follow next, followed by associations with the children of family friends or neighbours going to the same school and continued parent detective work to find out who her son’s new friend is etc.
Maybe we will find all of this out when the woman takes the stand.
Caroline Stewart Tanti lists on her Facebook page that she “worked” (Facebook-eze for ‘currently works’) at Masquerade.
https://www.facebook.com/carolinestewart.tanti?ref=ts&fref=ts
She would thus have a pretty good idea of Lisa Zahra’s true age, without having to rely on what he son says. I can’t but help think Ms Stewart Tanti was somehow trying to exculpate herself and her son by saying she thought the victim was 17 (albeit still her son’s minor pupil), and that she was in collusion with him on certain matters.
That’s exactly what I believe happened at the cliff edge.
I think there also was a struggle in which she managed to take his jacket and contents down with her.
When will they stop repeating the same rubbish?
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-04-13/news/tanti-could-still-face-up-to-23-years-if-murder-charge-is-dropped-4607442946/
‘..Murder and assisted suicide charges baffle lawyers
Erin Tanti has been charged with both murder and assisting a suicide. Mr Attard thinks that these charges are contradictory. “They do not make sense. It is either one or the other. And I would think that the police issued these charges with the blessing of the Attorney General. We will have to wait and see what comes out of the compilation of evidence and what the magistrate decides in the end.”…’
What did this ‘historian’ expect, that Tanti be charged on one count alone and risk having it dropped?
In the end Tanti will, should, be found guilty of having attempted to ‘assist’ suicide,(another misnomer) resorting to murder. Or perhaps his murder attempt was to get her to do it for him as he watched.
As if Lisa Maria Zahra can be considered responsible for any of this.
Assisting her suicide, as some idiots said on this blog; ‘were it not for him, she’d be long dead, he kept her alive’, is his real plan B.
He admitted it himself; he planned to flee the island. That comes first on the list, the rest is alibi.
Trust local ‘experts’ to endeavour to sing along Tanti’s ode to his ego. This is not about him, this is about the death of an innocent fifteen year old schoolgirl. Her name was Lisa Maria Zahra.
Let’s have someone contradict her innocence, now, in the name of some gutter spite to moral truth.
Let’s hear them proclaim the right to consume children as collateral damage in the war on taboo. Let’s have them repeat she asked for it.
This Attard legitimises Tanti’s actions and doesn’t even know it.
This supposedly christian island can’t discern right and wrong, good and evil if these had to be spelt out of loudspeakers North Korea style, at every street corner.
Tanti failed in provoking scandal, in the end he was soon sidelined as picturesque peasant folklore.
A point i haven’t yet seen made. Why did he take with him the love letter from the Danish girl if not to show it to the infatuated and inebriated girl, while telling her that he is going to leave her,, and that her life is pointless, working her up to jump off the cliff? What a nasty person!
http://www.transcript-review.org/en/issue/transcript-38-malta/poetry-albert-marshall
Albert Marshall. It figures.
The circle-jerk of Maltese intellectuals.
They’ve squeezed out everyone else. Why does intellectual life in Malta have to be dark, morose and depressing? It’s all too much like Maltese poetry force-fed to school children: tedium, at best, but so much about grim, drab internal lives.
Of course that’s what he actually did. Was there ever any doubt?
What you have written is spine chilling, but unfortunately it sounds so true.
I’m sure you are perfectly right.
I would add that she must have either grab at his jacket, which he was holding in his hands.
Or she was feeling cold and she had the jacket over her shoulders.
It was early morning and it is usually very chilly.
We must not forget that they spent about three hours talking or whatever, before the final act.
That is why he tried to go down and retrieve his jacket but did not make it and had to fall to plan B which I’m sure was something he thought of on the spur of the moment, which did not work out either.
If this venomous snake Erin Tanti and his lawyer would have us continue believing that he and Lisa went to Dingli Cliffs to commit a double suicide then they’re completely nuts.
You don’t lock your car if you’re about to commit suicide. You don’t steal large amounts of cash and take them with you if you’re planning on committing suicide.
You don’t bother to take your passport with you if you’re committing suicide – or is he now mistaking himself for Tutankhamen, stocking himself with all the necessary stuff for his voyage to the afterlife?
Stop insulting our intelligence, Mr Tanti.
I believe he pushed her and I also think that she was under the impression that they were leaving the island together.
If she was planning suicide, no one would have needed to push her to write a suicide note and make sure it was found.
She would have done it without being prompted. Clearly, his plan was totally different.
My goodness… I can’t shake the nagging feeling either…I think he pushed her…BUT when I said this in front of someone, I was told that, had he done so, they would have found his fingerprints or marks, on her body during the autopsy… so I think that is something we should rule out.
[Daphne – What total rubbish. You can’t find fingerprints on a body, and pushing somebody doesn’t leave finger-marks on a corpse. Even if this were possible, those finger-prints could have occurred at any time and for any reason given the goings-on. You really must try to be less credulous.]
The question that one needs to ask here is how did his jacket end up next to Lisa Maria? I think, most probably she threw it down there… I do not think he pushed her.. at all.
I think he went down for his keys n passport, planning to leave her body there n flee. Most probably he either didn’t manage to reach the jacket or he fell on the way down there cause he was too doped.
Maybe Erin did not physically push her off the cliff but if you take a vulnerable teenager, in love with her teacher, pump her up with booze and pills, take her to Dingli cliffs to end up the relationship (as he admitted to the police), I think that is the equivalent of a good shove off the cliff.
The break-up could have triggered Lisa to jump, dragging his jacket down with her.
Without his passport and keys his “plan B” of leaving the country in case the suicide does not work out” could not materialise.
[Daphne – You don’t understand female psychology. The instantaneous reaction of a woman/girl who suddenly discovers that he has made plans to run off without her, while she has believed something else entirely, would be to fling the jacket containing his means of escape off the cliff: “There goes your plan. That will teach you. Try running off now without your passport and car keys.” And the immediate reaction of a man to something a woman says or does which startles or shocks him is, if he has been programmed not to hit a woman, to shove her instead. If he has no internal programming against hitting women, he will hit her.]
Agree, that makes much more sense.
What if he intended to flee to Denmark, and that’s why he had the Danish girl’s letter with him?
Oh come on, flee to Denmark? With Eur2,500? And do what – join a circus?
No, he just took the letter with him to deliberately hurt Lisa and sadistically make her suffer.
I wouldn’t be surprised that he wrote the letter himself in order to torture Lisa Maria.
I mean would you imagine a Danish girl writing a letter to this creep? Ma tantx tinzilli lili – u ohra, kemm ghadek tisma b’zaghzagh jiktbu ittra? Dan iz-zmien kollox Facebook, Twitter u email.
Let’s say you are right here and that he didn’t want to leave the country but took the letter and passport to hurt her.
You are right, what would you do in Denmark with 2,500? Hardly anything BUT doing what he did and staying in Malta, he would have been caught straight away.
Ending up a relationship with a vulnerable girl of 15, which most probably was her first love, giving her pills and booze, taking her at 4am or so to Dingli Cliffs is like practically telling her to jump. Instead of pushing her with his own hands, he pushed her with his nasty actions. In my opinion that is homicide too.
I think the jacket issue all depends on its proximity to the victim.
If the jacket was found several metres away from Lisa then Daphne’s theory of the jacket being thrown by her and him retaliating by pushing her would be the most plausible since I very much doubt that the throwing of a jacket and a person jumping off a cliff would land in exactly the same place.
If the jacket was found only a metre or two away from Lisa then I would think that he would have pushed her and in an attempt to clutch on to dear life she would have grabbed hold of the easiest thing to grab a good hold of (in this case being Erin’s open jacket) and in a panic to free himself not to get pulled down with her he would have wriggled his way out of it leaving Lisa fall with the jacket gripped in her hand possibly only letting go of it while falling.
The wonders of Facebook.